When people think of existentialism, the names that usually come to mind are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Sartre. Yet Walter Kaufmann, one of the twentieth century’s foremost interpreters of the movement, begins the story somewhere unexpected—with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. In the opening essay of Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Kaufmann makes a striking…

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